POP!

"You never remain with any feeling, pure and simple, but always surround it with the paraphernalia of words. The word distorts it; thought, whirling round it, throws it into shadow, overpowers it with mountainous fears and longings. You never remain with a feeling, and with nothing else: with hate, or with that strange feeling of beauty. When the feeling of hate arises, you say how bad it is; there is the compulsion, the struggle to overcome it, the turmoil of thought about it. Try remaining with the feeling of hate, with the feeling of envy, jealousy, with the venom of ambition; for after all, that's what you have in daily life, though you may want to live with love, or with the word love. Since you have the feeling of hate, of wanting to hurt somebody with a gesture or a burning word, see if you can stay with that feeling. Can you? Have you ever tried? Try to remain with a feeling, and see what happens. You will find it amazingly difficult. Your mind will not leave the feeling alone; it comes rushing in with its remembrances, its associations, its do's and don'ts, its everlasting chatter. Pick up a piece of shell. Can you look at it, wonder at its delicate beauty, without saying how pretty it is, or what animal made it? Can you look without the movement of the mind? Can you live with the feeling behind the word, without the feeling that the word builds up? If you can, then you will discover an extraordinary thing, a movement beyond the measure of time, a spring that knows no summer." - J. Krishnamurti, The Book of Life

I've been pondering along this line for awhile, the insufficiency of words, that the name of a thing is not the thing, and that I can only share an image of my experience or my thought that you then filter through your own life. This limitation frustrates and distorts, but I continue because I'm human and I have to, I need someone else to hear and identify and recognize, to be human with me.

New things for me: to continue doing something despite an inability to do it "right" (whatever right is) and to try to remain with a thought or emotion without reaction or judgement (good luck with that clay.) It all seems to come down to a need to engage every day in a process of deflating my ego, of jabbing a pin in my own balloon - POP.

But I muted the T.V. ...

"Silence is difficult and arduous, it is not to be played with. It isn't something that you can experience by reading a book, or by listening to a talk, or by sitting together, or by retiring into a wood or a monastery. I am afraid none of these things will bring about this silence. This silence demands intense psychological work. You have to be burningly aware of your snobbishness, aware of your fears, your anxieties, your sense of guilt. And when you die to all that, then out of that dying comes the beauty of silence." - Jiddu Krishnamurti.

It seems that my whole life has been a quest for silence, but the more quiet my surroundings were, the chattier my mind became. I'm still apt to "time-travel" in unguarded moments, by that I mean that my thinking attempts to get out in front of any problem (real or perceived) by running every possible scenario to every possible resolution, and I end up so overwhelmed that I sit on my ass and bleat "woe is me." I am more likely to catch myself today, and to watch my breath in and out and come back to here and back to now, and here now is nice. I should hang out here now more often. Namaste, clay

so what's the plan?

Hi. My first blog, "enigmatisms," faded into oblivion due to a fatal lack of direction from yours truly. I just ran out of things to do with it.

I do want to continue writing, I'm just not sure what, so we come to this unstructured, messy, wandering thing. What's the plan? No plan, which is either wonderfully zen or just lazy, possibly both.

About the name - in recovery I started (and continue) to seek a God of my understanding. a power greater than myself that can solve my problems, drinking and other. Part of this was the realization that for most of my life I was God, or at least I thought I had that power. I was ego run amok... amokamokamokamok. I didn't understand that I'm an egomaniac because I didn't feel superior to anybody. So I'm an egomaniac with an inferiority complex. Ain't that some shit. So while I was surfing the net I came across "autotheism," which has as one of its definitions the deification of self. I didn't really think I was God, but I acted that way. So the name of the blog.

I hope to post on a regular basis, but I can't say that's the plan, because there is no plan. Namaste, clay.